And there was Meredith. The crowd parted to let her through. She stood bathed in Terry Heinemann’s Clam Castle’s amber mood lighting, cautioning, “Boys, boys.”
It was a thing to see, the way everyone fell quiet and turned to look at her. Even the little children stopped their crying.
Meredith offered Abe a napkin, then gave her right hand to the person on her right, her left to the person on her left. She said, “Let’s all join hands for a minute.”
Well, everyone did. It was kind of a chore for me, holding Jerry’s hand, but this was more than made up for by Barbara’s cool palm pressing mine. Meredith said, “Why don’t we go outside and breathe the night air.”
In the parking lot we all formed a large circle. People I knew held hands with people I didn’t: an unbroken chain beneath the Big Dipper. Light winds carried sweet ocean salt on a mist that rose from slow waves breaking against the jetty. Lifeguard stands loomed. In the harbor: moored day sailors equipped with aluminum masts and homemade cannon, clinking with tackle and line, making bell sounds; and the deeper, melancholy pitch of the distant bell buoy, rocking beneath the moon.
“Look at the moon,” said Meredith. We looked. It hovered yellow and large above the sea. Yellow moonlight skipped off white sand and turned the flickering wave tips silver-gold. Looking farther out, the eye followed a shining highway of moonlight traveling over deep water to the horizon. Meredith said, “The light of the moon makes a shining path to each of us. Wherever we stand, the path will cross the water to find us. Go up or down the beach, and it will follow.”
“Yes,” said people in the circle. And, “That’s right.” In this way, a vision we’d seen and taken for granted all our lives, simple reflected light, became miraculous.
Later, after the meeting was over and everyone had gone home, Meredith said to me, “Let’s go out on the jetty and take off our clothes, like we used to. Want to?”
How I did. How I wanted to get naked on the rocks with my moonlit wife. But I have to report that after what had happened that morning in the living room with her and Bob and the sound of drums rolling from the stereo, I didn’t think the jetty was anywhere I wanted to go.
What happened was this. It was midmorning. I’d endured a sleepless, ghoulish night in the rain. The foot was buried, I was bushed, and my coffee was cold. I mean, I was out of it, slouching in the big wicker chair and watching Meredith sway to the drumbeats and Bob’s cadenced breathing instructions:
“Easy, easy, slow, slow.”
Meredith’s eyes were closed. Her dress hung loosely about her legs and hips. I leaned forward to adjust the fabric. She inhaled and exhaled. I watched her toes twitch, and I noticed her head nodding; and my head nodded too, in time with hers, when the trance coach commanded, “Prepare to dive!”
Suddenly I was weightless. Everything felt still and cool. I drifted in the wicker chair. The voice of the professor told us to find our animals, and I looked up to see a silvery fish with boxy jaws and round eyes fixed to oblong sides of an enormous head.
The living room was gone. It was a world of blue. The big fish showed lustrous teeth. One great fish eye stared at me. We were face-to-face. I opened my mouth and bubbles came out when I inquired, “Honey, is that you?”
The fish’s gills flowered open to catch the current — I took this breathy fluttering for a yes. Sideways swam Meredith the coelacanth; I watched her corpulent torpedo length rotate into view, fins fanning. Then the gills lightly closed against translucent pink flesh and the white of bones dimly visible. No bright shafts of sun streamed downward to illuminate these obscure depths; only a vague semiglow lit that oceanic darkness full of beings and things: my primordial, buoyant wife; midnight configurations of rock and reef behind her; and my own hands, icy cold and floating weightless to reach out and caress Meredith’s beautiful metallic face, which I wanted to kiss even in spite of those scaly lips. Perhaps she, too, felt the gravity of attraction: she flexed her body, bared her gills, wiggled her tail, darted minutely forward to perform close-in pecking motions — as if feeding! Her heavy snout nipped my nose, but gently. Such strange pleasure. I paddled toward that divine fish face. “Let’s fuck now,” I called to the pretty young thing with the impressive teeth. She did a little flip. I reached out to stroke her spiny erect dorsal fin, which I gamely imagined might bear erotic as well as hydrodynamic utility. That’s when I noticed that my hands were no longer hands, they were hooves. Fur wreathed them. They galloped and stamped, kicking sand and sending bottom life scurrying for the low cover of the reef. Overhead the love of my life swam around and around; her watchful lidless gaze did not leave me; nor did I ever look away from her, as the change came over me and I became my animal and knew myself to be a bison.
For her part, Meredith wore a wild look. The problem was that I was in the wrong ecological habitat and was dying. Loamy mud sucked me down into itself, as an abundance of matted brown buffalo fur rose kelplike from my own mammoth breast, filling my mouth and washing up into my burning eyes. All I could see was nothing. Love and dread fired my beating heart, and I cried, “Meredith!” but no intelligible sound came out, only hoarse bellowing through the brine.
For a while I fought. Then there was nothing to do. I breathed in the cold. Closed my eyes. Felt Meredith’s cool lips on mine.
All the pain went away, and my frightened mind became silent and blue.
Sometime later I opened my eyes. I was in the living room, flat on my back, looking up at the ceiling. Bob’s face floated into focus. The assistant professor was sitting over my hips in the sexual posture of someone giving a backrub, though it was my front and not my back getting the rubbing. Close by was Meredith. She wasn’t a fish. She was on her knees, her body rising above me. Beyond her: eggshell walls and ceiling showing plainly visible cracks spiderwebbing from stained corners, a hairline map of creeping water damage reaching almost to ceiling’s center. Was the roof leaking?
Bob’s hands pushed on my sternum, pushed me down into carpet sponging beneath me. On my skin: a coating of prickly warm sweat. I felt Meredith’s hand reaching out to touch me, the forefinger and thumb pinching shut my nose. She leaned over me and lowered her head. Her face, seen like that, by which I mean from below, coming down — her face looked like the face of someone preparing to drink directly from a stream, as watched from beneath the water’s surface. Here came Meredith’s mouth opening to show tongue and teeth. Here came lips. I tasted lipstick, felt Meredith’s hair feathering down to tickle my forehead and neck, when she pressed her mouth against mine.
“Breathe,” Bob commanded, as air from my wife’s body flooded me. For a while it went like this: he thrusting rhythmically down; she blowing; he letting up; she raising her head to take in fresh oxygen before descending again in search of the seal between our mouths. Finally I lifted my hand from the floor and touched the back of Meredith’s head, as if guiding her to me.